The General Services Administration announced Thursday it had awarded 43 blanket-purchase agreements to small businesses to provide discounted commodity IT through the agency's National Information Technology Commodity Program (NITCP). The NITCP is designed to provide agencies a one-stop shop for the most commonly purchased, low-cost IT products.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission needed to find savings after its IT budget received a 15 percent reduction in 2012. Kim Hancher, the EEOC CIO, decided to reduce spending on mobile devices and instituted a BYOD policy to cut spending by almost 50 percent.
December 6, 2012

From digitization of mail to GPS tracking, the Postal Service is investing in new technologies to help it grow revenue. Ellis Burgoyne, the agency's chief information officer, says his department is concentrating on five main projects in 2013 that will help the Postal Service cut costs while improving efficiency and customer service. USPS ended fiscal 2012 with $15.9 billion of debt.

Despite spending billions to maintain legacy IT systems, many agencies are failing to properly review whether there is a sound basis for continuing them, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

Frank Baitman, the HHS chief information officer, said the agency will move its HR systems to a shared services provider in the coming year. He said HHS also will issue a solicitation for cloud services in 2013.
November 15, 2012

Terry Edwards, the director of the Office of the Chief Systems Engineer and chief information officer for the assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology, said his office helps acquire technology and ensure standards are met.
November 1, 2012(Encore presentation December 27, 2012)

Agencies have identified 98 opportunities where they can save real money by consolidating IT systems or by implementing better buying processes. In an exclusive interview, federal CIO Steven VanRoekel said most fall in the commodity IT areas of email, servers and other areas where agencies tend to spend a lot of money for IT.

Satisfaction with federal e-government sites remained high throughout most of 2012, according to a quarterly report from ForeSee and the American Customer Satisfaction Index. On a 100-point scale, customer satisfaction with federal websites now sits at 75.3. That's actually down slightly from last quarter, which had set an all-time high, according to the latest report.

Al Tarasiuk, the chief information officer for ODNI and for the intelligence community, said the IC-IT Enterprise strategy is centralizing technology services across the 17 agencies.
October 11, 2012(Encore presentation November 22, 2012)